1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to a toy capable of performing a simulated instrument play, particularly to a toy capable of performing musical instrument playing action in synchronization with reproduced sound and/or video information contained in such as a Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) signal recorded in the subcode area of digital audio recording mediums such as compact discs (CD), or digital audio tapes (DAT), or in the MIDI signal recorded together with audio data in a data recording area of digital recording mediums such as CD-ROMs, etc., or in synchronization with reproduced sound and/or video information transmitted via satellites or cables by being accompanied by characters being transmitted (character-broadcasting).
2. Description of the Prior Art
There have been systems in which electro-mechanical driving devices such as actuators are built into an acoustic musical instrument such as piano so that the instrument is played live electro-mechanically by suitably controlling the driving devices.
An example of such prior art system is shown by a reference numeral 30 in FIG. 1. In FIG. 1, the system 30 comprises a control signal receiver 31, a control signal decoder 32 and an electro-mechanical drive unit 33. A control signal received by the control signal receiver 31, is decoded by the control signal decoder 32 and the electro-mechanical drive unit 33 is directly controlled thereby to play the acoustic musical instrument electro-mechanically.
Since such control signal is used in this system 30 to play the actual musical instrument electro-mechanically, there may be a time delay associated with the operation of the drive unit 33 itself or in relation to the mechanically driven components of the instrument, this delay can be dependent upon the playing note(pitch) of the music.
Therefore, when the drive unit is operated in response to an instrument playing information, resultant play of the musical instrument may become inaccurate. In order for such system to play music accurately, it has been required to prepare the instrument playing information designed exclusively to the system by preliminarily making time adjustments according to the musical scale. In such case, it is quite possible that such exclusively prepared playing information can not be used to play other systems than the intended one.
An example of this kind of system is an automatic piano player which plays electro-mechanically an actual acoustic piano live in response to a recorded program being reproduced. In this case, the programs for this system are quite likely exclusive to acoustic pianos, thus the programs can not generally be applied to other instruments under the control of personal computer.
Further, as shown in FIG. 2, there is a toy of prior art which simulates dancing in synchronization with played music under a limited condition. In this prior art example, the toy takes in the form of potted plant having a flower. A sound detector or microphone 41 mounted on an upper portion of the flower pot detects environmental sound, music or voice whose level is above the designed threshold for the toy. Electro-mechanical driving unit 42 which includes a motor (not shown) is provided within the flower pot. The driving unit 42 is actuated in response to an output of the sound detector 41 to move the flower as if it is dancing.
Since such toy simply reacts to the total input sound having the level over the threshold, its movement can not synchronize with a music of specific instrument which may be one of the musical instruments playing together. This problem would be evident when the sound level of such instrument is lower than others'.
Thus, the movement (instrument playing action) of this kind of toy is poor as its performance.
In order to solve this problem, it may be considered to design the toy to recognize the sound, i.e. detecting the intended sound exclusively, of such specific one of the instruments so that the toy may perform sophisticated movements reacting to the recognized sound of the specific instrument. In such a case, however, highly complicated techniques including voice recognition technology, would be required. Further, since a sound recognition system for such purpose generally require a computer, an A/D converter, a D/A converter, etc., it would become too bulky and expensive for a toy.